Read the Introduction
Every great wine is pressed from a harvest, and every great law is pressed from a harvest of disputes. The maxims of equity are the oldest pressed wine of the Western law, and they did not begin as maxims. They began as decisions, thousands upon thousands of them, the daily judgments of the Roman praetor, the magistrate who stood in the open air of the forum and heard the disputes that the strict law could not answer. The law of Rome, for all its grandeur, had a weakness that every strict law has always had: it was precise, and precision is blind. It could say what was legal, but it could not always say what was right. And so the Romans, being a practical people, made a place for the right. Beside the civil law they built the praetor's law, the law of the man who did justice when the books were silent, and the praetor's law was equity before equity had a name.
Then the jurists of Rome did what the vintner does with the harvest. Over the centuries they pressed the decisions into rules, and the rules into sentences, until at the end of the Digest, the great compendium in which the Emperor Justinian gathered a thousand years of Roman law, they set a final title: De diversis regulis juris antiqui, concerning the diverse rules of the ancient law. Two hundred maxims, distilled from the whole of Roman jurisprudence, standing at the end of the books like the essence left in the bottom of the vat. That title is the ancestor of this book, and of every book of maxims written since. What you hold is a continuation of a work two thousand years old: the same pressing, the same patience, the same faith that the harvest of human disputes, rightly worked, gives up at last a few sentences that carry the truth of all of them.
The maxims did not stay in Rome. They crossed into the medieval world in the books of the civil law, and they crossed into England in the saddles of the clerics and scholars who carried the Roman learning wherever they went. In England they found their true home, not in the courts of common law, which had their own strictness and their own blindness, but in the chancery, the court of the king's conscience, where the chancellor sat alone and did for England what the praetor had done for Rome: he answered the disputes the strict law could not reach. The maxims were the chancellor's native tongue. He did not cite them; he lived them. They were the rules of his conscience, and the court of conscience administered them for four hundred years.
In time the maxims were gathered into books, as the Romans had gathered theirs. The Year Books and the great reporters preserved them in the cases. Littleton and Coke pressed them into the learning of the common law. Francis Bacon, the same Bacon who wrote the essays, published in 1630 his own collection of the rules and maxims of the law, because, he said, the maxims were "the strength and sinews of the law," the places where the whole body of the law could be felt in a single touch. The tradition crossed the Atlantic with the law itself. In the young Republic, John Bouvier pressed the maxims into his Institutes; Joseph Story wrote them into the Commentaries that American lawyers have quoted for two centuries; and in our own century the Restatements carried the same distilled rules into the modern law. The distillation never stopped. From cases to rules, from rules to maxims, from maxims, in this book, to a chain of twelve that closes upon itself.
The twelve were chosen, and they were not chosen arbitrarily. They are the maxims that govern the whole of equity: the maxims that the chancellors actually administered, that the courts still quote, that the scripture and the law both teach. And they are set here not as a list but as a chain, because that is what they are. Each maxim is the logical consequence of the one before it; each hands its force to the one after; and the twelfth returns to the first, so that the chain is a loop and the system is closed. This is the deepest distillation of all: not two hundred rules, but twelve; and the twelve, one.
This book is laid out as the knowledge itself was laid down, whole first, then parted.
It opens with the chain, as you have read it: the twelve maxims as one unbroken chain, so that the whole system is met before any part of it. The chain is the book's frontispiece and its creed. Everything that follows is an unpacking of what is already contained in those sentences.
Then come the twelve chapters, one for each maxim. Each chapter is a journey into one link of the chain. It begins with the maxim in its own words, the Latin as the chancellors spoke it, and takes each word apart, so that not only what the maxim means but why it means it is laid open. From the words the chapter turns to the lineage: where the maxim came from, how it grew in Rome and England and America, who administered it and how. Then to the law itself, the statutes and rules that carry the maxim into operation today. Then to the cases, the decisions in which the maxim was proved, told as the stories they are. Then to the scripture, for these maxims are not merely legal; they are moral, and their deepest roots are in the law written on the heart. Then to the public documents, the charters, treaties, constitutions, and statutes in which the maxim appears or is deployed. And finally to the argument: how the maxim argues, what it answers, and the traps that lie in its misuse. Each chapter closes by handing on to the next, for the chain does not stop, and neither does the book.
After the twelve chapters, the book turns to the courtroom: what happens when the chain walks into a modern court. There the twelve presumptions that confront every suitor are met, the presumptions that circulate in the doctrine of the day, and each is answered by the maxim it offends, with the verified law that governs the real device behind it, and the instruments that carry the answer into the record. This is the maxims at war, which is where maxims ultimately prove themselves.
A word on honesty, before the chapters begin. This book is written for the whole country, and it cites only public documents, the charters, treaties, constitutions, statutes, and rules that any reader may verify. Every citation has been checked against the primary record before it entered these pages. Where the book offers interpretation, the mappings, the symbolism, the doctrine, it says so plainly. Law is law; doctrine is marked as doctrine. Nothing unverified enters these pages. The reader may trust what is here, and may verify everything.